Thursday, October 30, 2014

#XBRL at Work

In the
past year, Congress has tried on three occasions to pass legislation that would
reduce the “XBRL burden” that some speculate is especially onerous for small
business. The “Promoting Job Creation and Reducing Small Business Burdens Act”
(H.R. 5405) includes language that would put the requirement to file XBRL on
hold for all filers that make less than $250 million dollars each year
(businesses that Congress considers to be “small”). This would effectively
eliminate the requirement for about sixty percent of U.S. filers, rendering
years of learning curve and the potential data set analysis useless as the data
would be vastly incomplete.A recent
push in Congress was made last spring, under H.R. 4164 (legislation that is now
a part of H.R. 5405). Since then, CompSci and others have been following the
lead of the Data Transparency Coalition,
helping to educate public filers, investors, and Congress about the benefits of
open data standards such as XBRL. In particular, CompSci has been highlighting
the ways in which XBRL works and assists businesses and investors alike.

Accordingly,
we have been publishing a series of tweets entitled “#XBRL at work” to help
illustrate the benefits of XBRL. Many of these tweets highlighted different ways
that XBRL is already helpful to investors and filers alike; and others pointed
out areas in which XBRL may be of further benefit.

We would
like to take a look back and bring it all together for you here. Additionally,
we would like to continue a conversation here, hopefully receiving feedback on
this list and gathering a growing list of suggestions for items that we have yet
to include.